Posted 11.15.2011 at 5:01 pm
3 Comments
The Human Arm Taken Over By a Robot
Bruno Adorno/LIRMM
Jot it down: November 15, 2011, is when it began. Researchers in France have given a small robot the ability to directly control a living human's arm by running electricity through his muscles. The evil little bot mercilessly forces blindfolded human test subjects to put a toy ball through a toy basket again and again, by stimulating electrodes attached to their arms.
The researchers have some story about how it's for therapeutic purposes -- a robot can use this ability to help a paralyzed human -- and also that co-opting human limbs is more cost-effective than building expensive, carefully engineered robot limbs.
March 11, 2014: The "robot made me do it" defense holds up in a court of law for the first time.
October 19, 2021: Robots of Canada send an army of slave humans against the United States.
Watch the video, and tremble.
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im dissapointed i thought itd make him dunk it or throw it dropping it isnt that impressive weve known electricity moves muscles for a long time
potentially useful yes but forit to be impressive it needs to be faster and more agile stupid spam filter what part of my post looks like spam ? except for bad grammar and punctuation
i disagree entirely with the statement above.
this is a great advancement. honestly, the applications a human-computer interface such that the computer can instruct the body's muscles to do this has a lot of potential.
scientific advancements are typically made in steps - not leaps. to hold off on sharing the tech until they had a basket ball player controlled by computer would be silly. that would suggest they wasted some non-trivial amount of time to prototype something that has no real world value.
how does a robot-controlled human athlete make the world a better place?
the demonstration of the tech is likely to spark inspiration from a variety of fields - from medicine, to military, maybe even education. these fields can brainstorm new applications for this tech before the basketball prototype even figured out how to get the person's leg muscles support their own body weight.
Great article!
So could we get a neural interface for the robot on the controlled person to have them control themselves after becoming paralyzed? I realize it's slow but it's better than becoming wheelchair bond do to a broken back.